London, United Kingdom, Feb. 22, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Kazakhstan Ministry of Health and SNOMED International jointly announce the addition of Kazakhstan as the organization’s thirty-eighth Member.

With a developing e-health program across the country’s hospital, Kazakhstan joins SNOMED International to bring structure and consistency in the sharing of health information for patient care, clinical decision support and research purposes. Enabling the consistency of health information through structured data will allow doctors to correctly interpret information, increasing the quality of health care delivery.

SNOMED CT is the world’s most comprehensive and precise health terminology. Founded in 2007 by nine charter nations, SNOMED International is a not-for-profit, member-owned and driven international organization. CEO of the organization, Don Sweete, comments, “as the newest Asia Pacific Member to SNOMED International, I applaud Kazakhstan’s desire to take on adoption and use of SNOMED CT as a core element to build a platform for accurate clinical information exchange and data analysis.”

In recent years, Kazakhstan has been dynamically entering the eHealth era. Codification is an essential part of this journey as health information should be captured, monitored, analyzed and disseminated among health professionals, health policy makers, and the public. As of January 2019, SNOMED CT becomes part of Kazakhstan’s infrastructure to ensure the exchange of accurate, relevant and timely information across all the information systems to support direct care, self-care and secondary uses of health information. The introduction of SNOMED CT will first of all become an important part of maintaining electronic health passports, a tool for reliable provision and automatic processing of clinically important information. The use of standardized clinical content will allow physicians to clearly formulate and interpret the data reflected in electronic health passports.

Olzhas Abishev, Vice-Minister of Healthcare of the Republic of Kazakhstan states that “SNOMED membership is an important step for the Republic of Kazakhstan to support interoperability solutions in the frame of moving towards achieving SDGs and supporting the newly adopted Astana Declaration. We cannot move forward without standardized data exchange”.

In general, the use of SNOMED clinical terminology will ensure early detection of emerging health problems in a patient, monitor the health status of the population, respond to changes in medical practice, reduce data duplication and avoid errors, ensure control over the provision of medical care with the ability to analyze medical records treatment together with other participants, using information about a specific patient, which is stored in a clearly structured format.

Kazakhstan becomes the 8th Member within the Asia Pacific region to join SNOMED International, setting the expectation for increased interoperability as well as the promise of leveraging learnings amongst its regional and international counterparts. Kazakhstan’s entry into this organization is a breakthrough step for the national health care system.

Read the full press release here.